The intention is to introduce you to the people who have been carving their own path...with no care for what anybody thinks.

We try not to post things that are still for sale but sometimes post things that are not easily available. If you like what you hear, then find these people and tell them how great they are.

Better still, tell them and then seek out their new releases and buy them. We add links, when they are reliable and active, so that you can keep track if you so wish.

Always go straight to the artist or the label where possible. That way, the money goes straight to the people responsible for this art. These people rely on our support to keep going and make more quality releases!

Please feel free to leave comments as you go along...at least then we know you appreciate this stuff (or otherwise) and you're not just a bunch of freeloading file collectors.

If you made this music and we have pissed you off by posting any of this, please leave a comment in the post and the offending articles will be removed.

Before there was Klanggalerie, there was Syntactic, an Austrian label that specialized in extremely limited (but generally high quality) 7" vinyl releases. Most are valuable collectors' items today, such as the records by Organum, CCCC, Main, Muslimgauze, Merzbow, and so on. This little record was produced in 1996 in that most inconvenient format, the compilation 7". That means very short songs by a lot of people, in this case shorter songs by more people than you might want on such a short little record: Thirdorgan, Sons of Silence, Fennesz, Christoph Kurzmann, Werner Mobius, Legion, Aube, King Lear's Convulsions (who?), Aube, The Haters, Scanner, and Makoto Takashima. Edition of just 100 copies. Pay a fortune to ruthless collector mercinaries, or just listen to it here.

Happy Friday! Here is an excellent collection of strange noise, low-fidelity songlike things and other beauties, released as two double-7" sets )and later as a box with all four 7"s in it) by Fisheye Records in 1997. I think it was supposed to be a compilation by people who hadn't yet had anything out on vinyl, but the concept may have been out of date by the time the records came out. Not that it matters. Music by The Shadow Ring, Wingtip Sloat, Rake, Hood, Prick Decay, Glands of External Secretion, Tea Culture, Noggin, The Negative Kite, Richard Youngs, Simon Wickham-Smith, and other names that I'm too tired to type right now. If any of the names I just listed caused a twinge of excitement in your brainstem, then you already know this was made for you. Enjoy your weekend.

It was only when preparing these Yeh posts that I realised that he had put some of his work up for streaming on UBU. So I'll leave the description to the man himself:

"Originally released on Helicopter as a 25+ minute long mono 7" single in an edition of 150. John Wiese and I were both a part of this "Free Noise UK" tour at the time which included a variety of "free jazz" and "noise" musicians. Both John and I had these matching handheld tape recorders, and so at any/all times, we'd collect various field recordings, soundchecks, vocal utterances, just total garbage, and every evening these pieces would find their way into the performances as source material. This 7" is a recording of Wiese playing back the accumulated recordings on the original handheld recorders. Titles were provided by saxophonist Evan Parker, one of the players in the "Free Noise UK" ensemble."

This cassette features one half by Controlled Bleeding (remember to go pre-order their 10 CD boxset & book!) and one half by Uncommunity, whose main instigator Tim Gane would go on to play in bands you might have heard of called McCarthy and Stereolab. Released by Broken Flag in 1986.

This time Yeh is joined by Pete Nolan (of the brilliant Magik Markers and a host of other delights). Three sides are literally homemade (hear those pots and pans rattle kids) whilst the final side is recorded live in Manhattan.

A split CD featuring a roughly equal amount of music both Controlled Bleeding and Belgian artist Dive, former singer with Absolute Body Control and The Klinik whose cringingly terrible lyrics have always prevented me from fully embracing his machine noise. Here's a sample (not taken from this album):

I'm caught in the web of your liesStrangled by the look of his eyesThe eyes of someone who criesThe eyes of someone who dies

Jesus fucking christ. Did an adult really write those words down, take time to sing them into a microphone with musical accompaniment, then reproduce the resulting song and several more like it on an album without feeling something like crippling shame? Which record label heard these lyrics and thought, "Yeah, that's pretty good. Let's invest our money into producing a thousand copies of this album. People will enjoy this." Someone must have bought that album, encouraging poor Dirk Ivens (Mister Dive) to drool out more lyrics of this quality on more albums full of similarly pitiable wank. Why did one of Dirk's friends not sit him down and try to convince him to maybe make instrumental music instead? Who would spend any amount of money on this pathetic first-draft-of-a-sad-diary-entry-from-elementary-school garbage?

Sadly, I did. I'm not proud to admit it, but it is true. But only because the great Controlled Bleeding took up half of this compact disc. It was released by the Portuguese label Fast Forward (who also put out a compilation CD that I like very much, and might post here someday) in 1996.

Another split LP with Controlled Bleeding (go pre-order their 10 CD BOXSET & BOOK right now!) on one side and Belgian (?) composer Benjamin Lew on the other. CB's half of the record was recorded in 1984 by Paul Lemos and Joe Papa (no Chris Moriarty on this one), Lew's half in 1988. The LP came out on Sub Rosa's short-lived Les Nouvelles Musiques de Chambre sub-label in 1988.